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Articles
Tools for Design and Visualization
- Eurovision Song Contest 2011 and NodeXL: A Perfect Match – Part I • Part II
- Eurovision Song Contest 2012 and NodeXL: A Second Brief Encounter
- My Design Tools – Part I • Part II
- Using Prototypes
- UI Toolbox: Capturing and Editing Screenshots – Part I • Part II
Simplification
- What Does "Simple" Mean?
- Anti-Simplification – How to Make Life Harder for Users
- Reducing Complexity
- Error Prevention Comes First
- Don't Let Your Interface Lie
- Don't Let Users Suffer from System Weaknesses
Interaction Design
- Password Usability: To Protect or Prohibit? new
- How to Increase Online Sales? new
- Progressive Disclosure
- User Experience and Experience Design
- A Humanistic Framework for Design
- Bridging the Gap – Part I • Part II • Part III
- Did You Make Your Selection? – Part I • Part II • Part III • Part IV
- The Software Works The Way I Think: Beyond Point and Click
- A Layman's View on Interaction Styles – Part I • Part II
- Selecting Objects By Attributes – Part I • Part II
Screen Design
- The Art of Hiding – Part I • Part II
- Screen Layout – Part I: General Considerations • Part II: Layout Hierarchy • Part III: Examples
Design Process
- Introduction to Design Thinking
- The Construction Cycle – Another Way to "Organize" the Design Process
- User Feedback
- What Does User Integration Mean for Software Design?
- Mapping a Conceptual Interface to a Physical Interface
Hierarchies
- Hierarchies - Categories vs. Vectors
- Fighting
(with) Hierarchies –
Part I: Basics • Part II: Presentation - Appendix: Fighting (with) Hierarchies – Presentation Techniques I • Presentation Techniques II
Visual Design
Articles
Web, Web Applications, Web Design
- The Web – A Short Introduction
- An Introduction to Designing User Interface Controls at SAP
- From Dropdown Listboxes to Comboboxes
- List Box Tweaks (Part II)
- Concept Statements and Website Messages – Part I • Part II
- Responsive (Web) Design
Performance
- Waiting at the Computer: Busy Indicators and System Feedback – Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3
- Human Performance at the Computer – Part 1: Introduction • Part 2: Making Applications More Responsive • Part 3: Perceived Performance • Part 4: On the Way to Performance-Oriented UI Guidelines
- Addressing a "Design Issue:" Start-Up Time
- Examples of Poor Responsiveness
Miscellany
- Adding Value to Your Interface by Using Simple Math and Matching
- Refreshing Three HCI Laws: Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, and the Power Law of Practice
- How Much Documentation Do Applications Need? – A Simple Example
- Human-Computer Dialog: How Good Does "Good Enough" Need to Be to Appear "Perfect"?
- Narrative User Interfaces
- Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces
- Universal Usability
- User Interface Controls and Interaction Techniques of Horror
- Designing for a Workforce That Acts More Sustainably – Part 1: Action Fields for Designers • Part 2: Action Items for Designers • Part 3: Designing for Remote Collaboration and Communication • Part 4: Using Ambient Media to Support Awareness of Remote Colleagues • Part 5: Using Persuasive Design/Technology • Part 6: Replacing Physical Objects with Virtual (Digital) Ones
- Using Ambient Media to Support Awareness of Remote Colleagues – Part 1: Examples • Part 2: Ideas
- A Proposal for Playful Interactive Persuasion: The "Employees' Commute Calculator" (ECC) – Part 1: The Easy ECC (E2C2) •
- Part 2: Ideas for a More Advanced Version
Design Tidbits
Updated: May 2, 2013
The Design Tidbits section offers a growing selection of articles centered around UI and graphic design.
Recent Additions
Password Usability: To Protect or Prohibit?
May
3, 2013: We are required to use an increasing number of user names,
passwords and PINs in our daily lives. We use them for logging on to
computers and networks, specific applications and websites, bank cards,
mobile phones and even entry door systems. In this article, Rikke
Friis Dam from IDF explains "What you should take into account
when designing password input forms."
- Read the article new
How to Increase Online Sales?
May
2, 2013: In this short article, Rikke Friis Dam from IDF explains
that "making customers register before they checkout is a barrier
to purchase" – and provides some evidence for it.
- Read the article new
Progressive Disclosure
April
23, 2013: How can you best provide a lot of information without
overloading the user? One possible answer to this question is Progressive
disclosure. In her article, Rikke Friis Dam not only explains
this technique from the very beginnings of graphical users interfaces,
she also points out that mobile has breathed new life into it.
User Experience and Experience Design
April
9, 2013: The extensive challenge designers and vendors of interactive
products face is that "Experience or User Experience" is not about
good industrial design, multi-touch, or fancy interfaces. "It
is about transcending the material. It is about creating an experience
through a device", states Marc Hassenzahl in his book on "User Experience
and Experience Design" in the Interaction Design Foundation's (IDF)
encyclopedia. Rikke Friis Dam's article is a condensed version of some
of Marc's points – focusing on his simple conceptual model of Why, What and How as
a starting point for the Experience Designer.
Responsive (Web) Design
December
18, 2012: In this article, our author provides an introduction
to "responsive design," or "responsive Web design," which
has lately stirred up quite a bit of interest in the design community.
When he first encountered this term, he assumed that it denoted design
strategies for making software applications and Websites more responsive
to user actions. Since he had spent some time on a project investigating
perceived performance (PeP), this association appeared only "natural" to
him. A closer look, however, revealed to him that the term "responsive
design" refers to something quite different. In the article, he
gives away what the term "responsive (Web) design" actually
means, explains what the goals and ingredients of this design strategy
are, shows examples of how it is applied, and finally takes a look
at how this strategy is discussed in the design community.
A Humanistic Framework for Design
September
6, 2012: In her book Inventing the Medium – Principles
of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, Janet H. Murray outlines
a new (she calls it "innovative") framework for design, in
which she adopts a humanistic instead of a social science or industrial
design perspective. In this article, which complements our review of
Murray's book, our author wants to briefly outline this approach because
it differs considerably from typical HCI-oriented design approaches
that currently dominate the UI design field.
Introduction to Design Thinking
September
1, 2012: Design Thinking is one of the more recent buzz
words in the design community. In this introductory article, our author
investigates what Design Thinking is, what its main characteristics
are, and takes a look at the process and the methods associated with
it. He also takes a brief look at the history of Design Thinking.
Eurovision Song Contest 2012 and NodeXL: A Second Brief Encounter
July
3, 2012: Last year, our author wrote a two-part article about this
visualization tool and applied it to the European Song Contest
(ESC) 2011 voting data. This year, he adds one more article on this
topic to his collection, in which he applies the tool to the ESC 2012
voting data. The main goal of this article is to look for some differences
and similarities between both years' voting data – and
to inspire readers to conduct further explorations and comparisons
of their own.
Related Editorials
- Is there such a Thing as Perceived Quality?
- Have You Ever Heard of Performance-Oriented (UI) Design?
- The Three Pillars of Human Performance at the Computer – Which One Fits Best?
- Finding Common Ground...
- Performance – Merely a Technical Problem?
- To Err Is Human – A Two-Sided Issue...
- The Blessings of Large Displays...
- What Matters Most?
- What is an Application Design?
- Usability Levels – Three Ways to Care for Usability
- Stumbling Blocks for Good Application Design
- Which Type of Prototype?
- The Dilemma of Good and Bad Examples
- From GUIs to Narrative Interfaces – From Point-and-Click to Computers Telling Stories
Related Articles from Editions
See Articles by Editions • See also Articles by Topic for a listing of edition articles by topic
